WiRE: Security Bootstrapping for Wireless Device-to-Device Communication

Rapidly evolving wireless technologies enable devices to directly exchange information without infrastructural support. In these device-to-device (D2D) communication scenarios, it is often difficult to setup cryptographic keys to initialize the secure communication, especially when the D2D connections are mobile and dynamic. This paper proposes an application layer solution scheme to bootstrap secure communications using the inherent randomness in the wireless transmissions. The proposed scheme is lightweight, easy to deploy and compatible with many physical layer wireless technologies. This paper contains security analysis to the scheme and conducts experiments to demonstrate its practicality.